Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
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I was recently asked whether we have a function to convert LDAP date time stamps into $HOROLOG format or other formats and the answer is not at the moment, but there is a simple method to do the conversion.

Let us look at the facts and figures involved...

1) Active Directory's (AD) date 0 (zero) is 1601-01-01 00:00:00.000 or January 1st, 1601 at midnight (00:00:00)

2) AD timestamps are calculated as the number of 100 nanosecond intervals from date 0

3) 864000000000 is the number of 100 nanosecond intervals per day

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Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

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This article will describe and include an example of how to embed an external PDF file into an HL7 segment, specifically ADT_A01:2.3.1 OBX(). This can be useful when attempting to insert pictures or other external data into an HL7 message. In this example, the name of the PDF file to be embedded is provided in the incoming HL7 message in OBX(1):ObservationValue field.

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Article
· Oct 18, 2016 7m read
Macros in the InterSystems Caché

In this article I would like to tell you about macros in InterSystems Caché. A macro is a symbolic name that is replaced with a set of instructions during compilation. A macro can “unfold” in various instruction sets each time it is called, depending on the parameters passed to it and activated scenarios. This can be both static code and the result of ObjectScript execution. Let's take a look at how you can use them in your application.

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Here you have an easy way to write and execute COS code from your unix scripts. This way one does not need to write routines or even open Studio or Atelier. It can be an option for simple and small actions for instance things like installation tasks or compiling.

See sample bash script (compile.sh) to compile classes:

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Have some free text fields in your application that you wish you could search efficiently? Tried using some methods before but found out that they just cannot match the performance needs of your customers? Do I have one weird trick that will solve all your problems? Don’t you already know!? All I do is bring great solutions to your performance pitfalls!

As usual, if you want the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version, skip to the end. Just know you are hurting my feelings.

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Process-private Globals can be used as a data global in storage definition. That way, each process can have its own objects for the class with ppg storage. For example lets define a pool, which can:

  • add elements to a pool (ignoring duplicates)
  • check if an element exists in the pool

Here's the class:

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Article
· Jul 22, 2016 16m read
Using Regular Expressions in Caché

1.About this article

Just like Caché pattern matching, Regular Expressions can be used in Caché to identify patterns in text data – only with a much higher expressive power. This article provides a brief introduction into Regular Expressions and what you can do with it in Caché. The information provided herein is based on various sources, most notably the book “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey Friedl and of course the Caché online documentation. The article is not intended to discuss all the possibilities and details of regular expressions. Please refer to the information sources listed in chapter 5 if you would like to learn more. If you prefer to read off-line you can also download the PDF version of this article.

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Cache tricks

Several years ago, long before Developer Community Portal was launched, I published a series of Caché tricks at one of Czech web sites. In this article, I’m posting translated version of one of them.

Capturing output of someone else’s methods or routines

Suppose you, or someone else created a useful method or routine, that was producing some computation that you’d like to benefit from, but the routine was writing output to process principal device.

You would like to use the data, but you need it not written to a device, but assigned to a variable. And, for any reason, you can’t modify the code. What can you do?

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Article
· Jul 15, 2016 5m read
Zinsert and friends: Coding in terminal

While Studio and Atelier are useful development interfaces, there are occasionally situations where a quick edit needs to be made to code and only terminal access is available. A useful set of tools to do this are the zload, zprint, zinsert, zremove, and zsave commands. These are abbreviated to zl, zp, zi, zr, and zs respectively. While each of these commands has its own page in documentation, this article will synthesize that information with examples to provide instruction for their combined use.

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Article
· Jun 13, 2016 1m read
Debug: using locks for breakpoints

Hi, Community!

Want to share with you one debugging approach from the Russian forum.

Suppose I want to debug the application and I want it to stop the execution on a particular line.

I add in code this line:

l +d,-d

When I want to start debugging in this line I block d in terminal

USER> l +d

And execute the app.

The app stops on this line and lets me connect to it with Studio debugger.

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NewBie's Corner Session 4 The Plus Sign and Concatenation Operators

Welcome to NewBie's Corner, a weekly or biweekly post covering basic Caché Material.

Click on the Caché Cube in your system tray and select Terminal to try out the commands.

Plus Sign (+) operator

Typically, the Plus sign (+) adds two numbers together. This is true in COS (Caché ObjectScript), but COS uses it in other ways as well.

Set the variable X to a value of +12

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Article
· May 20, 2016 12m read
Collations in Caché

Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

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NewBie's Corner Session 2 Variables Set and Write commands

Welcome to NewBie's Corner, a weekly or biweekly post covering basic Caché Material.

Session 2 – Click on the Caché Cube in your system tray and select Terminal to try out the commands.

Variables

Like other computer programming languages, Caché uses Variables and the values they represent to control programming. Variables are elements that represent data values. Manipulating and interrogating variables is at the root of programming.

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Article
· May 13, 2016 1m read
mySQL data importer tool

Hi,

If you want to import data from a mySQL export file (exported with mysqldump), you will find here a little script that could help.

Only the INSERT commands in the sql file are executed into Caché. Indices are not computed for better performance.
%NOINDEX, %NOCHECK and %NOLOCK are generated on each INSERT line.

Currently, the file can not contain a "),(" pattern inside the values part of the INSERT command. If this is the case, the line is skipped. This feature may be implemented in the extractValuesList method.

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The topic of for/while loop performance in Caché ObjectScript came up in discussion recently, and I'd like to share some thoughts/best practices with the rest of the community. While this is a basic topic in itself, it's easy to overlook the performance implications of otherwise-reasonable approaches.

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Hi!

I believe the simplest is (to work with csv delimited by ";"):


set file = ##class(%File).%New( "data.csv" )
    set sc = file.Open( "R" ) 
    if $$$ISERR(sc) quit    ; or do smth

    while 'file.AtEnd {
        set str=file.ReadLine() 
        for i=1:1:$length( str, ";" ) {
            set id=$piece( str, ";" ,i ) 
            write !, id  // or do smth
        }
    }
    do file.Close()

Possible options:

different variants of error handling with sc code.

Embrace while loop into try/catch block.

And what's yours?

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Hi!

Want to share with you code snippet of try catch block I usually use in methods which should return %Status.


{ 
 try {
  	$$$TOE(sc,StatusMethod())
 }
 catch e {
 	set sc=e.AsStatus()
 	do e.Log()
 }

Quit sc 
}

Here $$$TOE is a short form of $$$TROWONERROR macro.

Inside macro StatusMethod is any method you call which will return %Status value. This value will be placed into sc variable.

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Hello!

Link: https://demo.cachequality.com

In this presentation, developer oriented, we will cover this tool, how it works, how you can use it/administer it, etc. Duration 30 minutes.

The topics will include:

  • a short presentation of Caché Quality and SonarQube (which this plugin uses),
  • a demonstration of the rules and how to tailor them to your need.

Questions will be more than welcome! Hope to see you there!

And a big thanks to Evgeny Shvarov who made this possible!

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Hello!

This article is a small overview of a tool that helps to understand classes and their structure inside the InterSystems products: from IRIS to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare.

In short, it visualizes a class or an entire package, shows the relations between classes and provides all the possible information to developers and team leads without making them go to Studio and examine the code there.

If you are learning InterSystems products, reviewing projects a lot or just interested in something new in InterSystems Technology solutions — you are more than welcome to read the overview of ObjectScript Class Explorer!

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